New York’s crushing toll burden could be lighter if the MTA and Port Authority would milk the cash cow they helped create.
But millions of dollars have slipped through the fingers of toll officials who can’t be bothered to make extra money off the E-ZPass tags in 24 million local vehicles.
Now a private company is independently using E-ZPasses as a payment method at fast-food drive-through windows.
But the MTA, for its part, seemed to dismiss the idea of cashing in on such a scheme.
“We’re a toll-collection agency,” said MTA spokeswoman Judie Glave. “We’re not in the business of making money through fast-food restaurants.”
In a brand-new program, five Wendy’s restaurants on Staten Island are now piggybacking on the E-ZPass network.
A device at the restaurants reads the tag and links its number to the credit- or debit-card account that the driver has loaded into the company’s database.
“It’s completely unrelated to your E-ZPass account,” said Eli Grinvald of iDriveThru, the firm that developed the concept.
If they were paying transaction fees to the toll authorities, the five restaurants could send up to $150,000 a year to public coffers.
And if all 49 of the city’s McDonald’s drive-throughs did the same, they could be kicking in $1.47 million in fees annually.
Multiply that by thousands of area drive-through eateries, pharmacies and coffee shops, and the big bucks could have eased the need for toll hikes like the one hitting PA crossings next week.
“What a no-brainer,” said Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute think tank. “We ought to be creative enough to figure out a way to put this infrastructure to use.”
In fact, the MTA once did. It tested an E-ZPass payment system at two Long Island McDonald’s drive-throughs in 2001.
“It was very successful operationally,” said Dean Sandbo, the restaurants’ owner at the time.
Purchases were deducted from customers’ E-ZPass accounts, just like tolls, and the MTA got 15 cents for every transaction.
“But we had instances of people stealing E-ZPasses to buy considerable amounts of food. And the customers didn’t know it until they got the E-ZPass bill weeks later,” Sandbo said.
The pilot project died.
Those behind the iDriveThru program say their program safeguards against such thefts.
“As you’re driving away, you get a receipt right on your smartphone,” said Stephen Baclini of Rawson Food Services, which owns the five Wendy’s stores.
“That would keep theft from being a problem. If someone used your tag, you’d know it,” Sandbo said.
Currently, the PA and other toll agencies let a few private parking companies take payments with E-ZPasses, said PJ Wilkins of the E-ZPass Interagency Group, the consortium that oversees the 15-state tolling network. But that’s the limit of the tags’ non-toll income.
“There’s a potential for revenue from the tags, and if a proposal came to us we would look at it,” Wilkins said. “But our business is tolling. That’s what we do.”